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Peetke writes "As we all know Oracle is not the biggest friend to the Open Source Community. Long standing OSS supporter Wikipedia has now moved from an optimized fork of MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.5, for both its English and German sites. Wikipedia expects all other languages to follow within a month. Performance-wise, this move has no big implications, but it will ensure our biggest community database will live long and prosper."

As a fork of a leading open source software system, it is notable for being led by its original developers and triggered by concerns over [the] direction [taken] by an acquiring commercial company Oracle.

It may only be an article but it says all that needs to be said. Oracle bought up MySQL and immediately dropped support for a range of systems that had previously been supported, probably in the hope it would drive scores of customers into the open arms of the Oracle sales team and their extortionate license prices. I now have to migrate several MySQL databases that previously lived a happy life on AIX 5 to something else and MariaDB is a welcome alternative because I'm sure as [Expletive deleted] not going to shell out thousands of $ for overpriced Oracle DBs with a pile of features that I don't need.

Young man, I'll have you know that I was using UNIX long before Linux was a 115 kB compressed tarball on the funet.fi FTP server.

If you're that old, a nickle should seem like a lot of money!

**Sigh** I'd explain the concept of inflation to you but I don't have the time. I'm busy loading shotgun shells with rock salt so I'll be prepared for the next time Larry Ellison makes the mistake of stepping onto my lawn.

For the last several years, we’ve been operating the Facebook fork of MySQL 5.1 with most of our production environment running a build of r3753. We’ve been pleased with its performance; Facebook’s MySQL team contains some of the finest database engineers in the industry and they’ve done much to advance the open source MySQL ecosystem.That said, MariaDB’s optimizer enhancements, the feature set of Percona’s XtraDB (many overlap with the Facebook patch, but I particularly like add-ons such as the ability to save the buffer pool LRU list, avoiding costly warmups on new servers), and of Oracle’s MySQL 5.5 provide compelling reasons to consider upgrading. Equally important, as supporters of the free culture movement, the Wikimedia Foundation strongly prefers free software projects; that includes a preference for projects without bifurcated code bases between differently licensed free and enterprise editions. We welcome and support the MariaDB Foundation as a not-for-profit steward of the free and open MySQL related database community.

It's part performance and part philosophical. Given that wikipedia is a strongly philosophical enterprise, this seems reasonable.

In a nutshell, they are working on NFS over IPv6, data integrity checks for ext3, they maintain libstdc++, they worked hard on BTRFS, If anything, they have helped open source much more than most other companies.

Again, I don't see the philosophical reasons other than 'because we can'.

Looking like you support OSS is not a bad business move as even Microsoft has learned. It also makes underhanded sabotage of OSS much easier because they can "We support OSS and aren't greedy scum" FUD most people.

Oracle has a few employees that are solid OSS contributors, and apparently they have some management support. That's been true for years (e.g. their OCFS filesystem...). However, they're only an OSS contributor in a tactical sense. Many years ago (and much earlier than one would've expected!) they came to the realization that Linux was the future (or at least, a large chunk of the future) in the server space, and they made the very smart tactical decision that they didn't want to be relegated to a dusty

Does the reason matter so long as they do it? And I doubt anyone ever believed that Oracle did it out of the kindness of their heart. They're a commercial organisation, they have to make a profit - or at least break even. And they won't do that buy not selling anything. In fact more people buying Oracle keeps them in business and that'll keep them employing OSS coders.

There's no such thing as a free lunch - OSS coders either have to be paid for their work or they do it in the free time when they can around

Yes because it means their support is shakey and their motivations can swing them in another direction at any time. Oracle can sabotage any project they are a part of and knowing who their CEO is should make people wary of them.

I'm not a purist but I get where the purists come from when it comes to Oracle. I don't trust them and I don't give them my money.

Well, the performance difference didn't seem to be huge - in fact, some stats were slower.... I don't buy for a second that it was for performance reasons.

??

For our most common query type, 95th percentile times over an 8-hour period dropped from 56ms to 43ms and the average from 15.4ms to 12.7ms.

Emphasis mine. This is a 18% drop in average query time. This is easily like getting an extra server for every 9 servers you already have. I don't know how many servers they have, but the transition represents thous

I don't understand why people trust MariaDB either. The result the last time everyone jumped onto Monty's open-source ship? He cashed out and put all of his customers on a road that led to being screwed by Oracle. There's a bit of madness expecting different results adopting MariaDB I wouldn't buy into either.

Hint: when a contributor agreement like the MariaDB one says copyright must be assigned to "Monty Program AB", your contributors are usually being setup so that the owner of that copyright can then profit from the community's free work on the project, a decision that will be motivated by what's best for them. There are a few software projects that require copyright assignment that aren't doing that, like the gnu projects. Monty Program AB is not a non-profit with a decades long history of anti-commercialism like gnu though. It's a regular company run by someone who has screwed both his paying customers and his open-source user community exactly this way once. Why are people signing up such that he could do it again?

The performance increases were negligible (with some decreases, as well) so: No reason to switch other than a symbolic statement and to avoid any potential future licencing issues or litigation. The MariaDB project will mirror the free-as-in-beer (and maybe paid?) features of future MySQL versions while aiming to be a "drop-in" replacement. On the other hand, it's better to do it now in case the projects do diverge and the MySQL upgrade path becomes problematic or expensive.

As far as I know they just stopped contributing to OpenSolaris. But they never attempted to stop anyone from picking it up and keep running with it, which led to Illumos and a few other projects taking its place. It's unfortuneate, but not evil.

Ah you're maybe referring to the CentOS-like clone they created from Red Hat's source packages. Once they spun their isos and slapped together a 3 page website they went after Red Hat's customers saying "their" so called unbreakable Linux is better than Red Hat's. That same unbreakable Linux which is based *entirely* on Red Hat's source packages. That's pretty evil in my book. Add how they are shielding off MySQL bugs and development and what they did to

Wikipedia was using a non-Oracle fork of MySQL (a Facebook maintained fork of MySQL 5.1) and moved to a different non-Oracle fork (MariaDB). The comment about Oracle not being a friend of OSS seems to be a non-sequitur.

Please point out the projects it contributed to?OpenOffice is dead and shipped off to apache, MySQL is stagnating, Oracle linux is nothing but a Redhat clone with no changes but copyright names change. Oracle is not a friend to open source. Never been either.

Oh, yeah, Java: I'm sure they'll have Lamba... any year now. For years C# and Java were leapfrogging one another in functionality - each would add everything the other had, plus a little, with each release. But that stopped when Oracle bought Sun, and Java fell far behind even their own plans.

Map, reduce, and similar list-processing operations have been one-line-with-lamba for many years now in C#, while Java has pushed lamba back yet another year, and I'm not sure it will even have inline list processin

In other words, the real problem is people expecting "open source" to mean the same as "free software." They don't. They are two different things. "Open source" is a pragmatic approach to making life easier for developers without overly inconveniencing profit-driven institutions; "free software" is a philosophical movement designed to ensure user freedom, even at the expense of corporate interests.

I've been in two private organisations that have been utterly fucked over with overpriced underperforming shit spewed forth by Oracle unthe the guise of some "solution" for something or other. Speaking to collegues at other organisations, my experience is not unique. Many of them have been oracled. The experience is never pleasant.

If they would stop acting like spoiled brats maybe Oracle might be less of a dick.

Why on earth would you think that? Oracle is far more of a dick to its paying customers than to the OSS community, probably because the OSS community can act like dicks and make a fuss and fork and/or not accept their changes.

The best way of getting fucked by oracle is to pay them money. But honestly, there are more pleasant ways of getting fucked for money and it will cost less than $10,000,000 a pop.

Since Oracle took over MySQL they've shown they routinely delay releasing patches for CVE security flaws for months until they can all be released together without documenting what fixes what issue. Several times updates have either ignore issues, removed fixes to earlier ones or in at least on case I remember applied a fix for an issue which failed to fix it and actually introduced a new one. This despite multiple FOSS projects (Debian,RHEL,MariaDB,Percona) having developed working patches separately which Oracle chose not to use.

They also don't disclose the details of many security vulnerabilities. That sounds reasonable on first glance, but it makes it a nightmare for sysadmins to assess whether it is worth system downtime to apply a patch, especially when that means upgrading to a newer DB version not tested against the application and which might break the application in several cases (for example due to the newer reserved keywords lists). A firewall or other measures may be sufficient to mitigate the threat, but that can't be assessed without seeing the details.

If well MariaDB is backward compatible with MySQL, have some advantages on its own, like more choices for storage engines (i.e. Aria as a better myisam than myisam, xtradb instead of innodb, and others), and should have better performance in general than Mysql for the same equivalent version in the same hardware.

Welcome to the OSI community, we do things cause we think its cool and then wonder why we fail. We need wikipedia though, it serves a purpose beyond its maintainers, so either join the community and protest, fork over some more money, or... do nothing and hope it stays up.

And yet I don't see this failure everywhere that you imply in your original comment.

Given that many OSI projects aren't failing and are in fact very successful and well-regarded in general, I'd say it has nothing to do with the model at all.

That is to say, unless you can show that OSI projects fail more frequently than commercial software projects, you have no point at all. Bear in mind that this must include *all* commercial software projects, which is very hard because unlike FOSS, those aren't necessari

Comparing OSI failure rates to commercial failures rates is very difficult as per THE TOPIC of TFA because there is no set standard for OSI to be deemed a failure outside of subjective analysis. In which case, there's tons and tons of failed projects, but a few major successful ones.

So an organization who asks for donations, waste their money changing Database systems for the sole purpose that they didn't like the company that bought the old one, although they didn't show any signs that they are going to damage the product or make it worse for them in any ways? Sounds like a wast of donated money to me.

For our most common query type, 95th percentile times over an 8-hour period dropped from 56ms to 43ms and the average from 15.4ms to 12.7ms. 50th percentile times remained a bit better with the 5.1-facebook build over the sample period, 0.185ms vs. 0.194ms. Many query types were 4-15% faster with MariaDB 5.5.30 under production load, a few were 5% slower, and nothing appeared aberrant beyond those bounds.

Better performance on such a heavy traffic site is neither a waste of time nor money!;-)

Ummmm... that's not what happened. They weren't using a stock release of MySQL. They were using an old 5.1 fork that Facebook created and has been maintaining. They decided they wanted the enhancements that the newer releases offered, and had a choice of migrating to a newer release of MySQL, or migrating to a newer release of MariaDB. Either way, they were migrating and had to put forth the effort to do so.

Not only this (but please mod up anyway!), but as far as I know MariaDB is compatible with plugins designed for a comparable version of MySQL. At least for my Django and PHP work this holds true. I mean, isn't this the reason most developers abstract the database library anyway?

As a WIkipedia donor.. I support this move. I got nothing against Oracle, but why would they use a database that is not the flagship database of the company? It's bound to cost more and lack features. MariaDB is owned by a foundation with goals more in line with Wikipedia.

They aren't changing database systems. They are upgrading to the latest mainline version of the database they were already using. Don't be confused by the name change: MariaDB is a recent fork of MySQL where most (all?) new open development occurs. See MariaDB [wikipedia.org] for the relevant history. Basically, "switching" from MySQL to MariaDB is like "switching" from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice or from XFree86 to Xorg. MySQL got taken over by Oracle so the real development was forked with the new name of MariaDB.

And what is wrong with that? Give old Monty some credit, the man managed to sell the product and keep it at the same time so at the end of the day all the corp ended up with was a now worthless name! That is fucking brilliant! How he managed to get the corp to agree to buy without a non compete clause i don't know, probably by being just that fucking slick, but its a trick worthy of playing the WB "sucker!" music at Oracle, damned smart if you ask me.

I don't see why the FOSSie faction has a shitfit when i point that out, how often do we see a little guy manage to totally fuck over a big corp just by having the big brass balls to pull it off?

That is why i say give the man some credit folks, he managed to pull a scam worthy of "The Sting" on a huge corp and got a big fat check AND got to keep the thing he was selling! That is fucking brilliant! Give old Monty credit, his balls are big and plentiful to pull something like that off and walk away scott fre

Nice to see I'm not the only one to think that, because 1.-They weren't using Oracle in the first place, they were using their own fork of MySQL, and 2.- They didn't have any reason to give a crap since again, they had their own fork which its not like Oracle can send them a C&D for forking a FOSS program.

So if they would have said "Look we are switching because the features we made the fork for are being included in MariaDB thus saving us money" or something like that? Cool, makes sense, smart move.

Even if they are volunteers they could be working on doing something else that may have saved them money.

Have you ever managed volunteers? They work on what they want to work on. You can't just reassign them to a task they don't like, or they will walk away and donate their time to some other organization. Most likely they had some MariaDB fanboi (or fangoil) who was willing to do this, but was not willing to upgrade MySQL instead.

Most likely they had some MariaDB fanboi (or fangoil) who was willing to do this, but was not willing to upgrade MySQL instead.

Doubtful. More likely they wanted to be able to get decent community support for the forseeable future. Something that's not a given for a previously community-based software product that got gobbled up by a succession of commercial entities.

Oracle has gone to great lengths to make MySQL a second-class citizen to its own database in terms of support, and worse, they're not really getting the whole community part of why people used MySQL in the first place...or maybe they *do* get it and just want MySQL to go away so they can sell Oracle DB.

Either way, the folks at Wikipedia must have seen value in moving to a compatible, open-source, community-based database...just like the one they started with.

Sadly that is true and why FOSS will ALWAYS suck for anything bigger than a project that can be done by a handful in a garage, its a problem I noted years ago and gave the name "Busted shitter problem".

You see if I ask for somebody to paint me a picture or sculpt me a bust or write a song for free? I will get several offers, some of which might even be really good. If I ask someone to come fix that overflowing shitter for free? Well I better get used to pissing in the sink.

What does that have to do with FOSS? Its actually quite simple in that for every decent programming job you have a dozen shitty jobs which is why companies like Apple, MSFT, and even Red Hat have to offer competitive salaries, because nobody wants to do a shitty job for free. But sadly when you are talking about a project run SOLELY with volunteers you just won't see those jobs get done, nobody wants to fix the busted shitters. Don't take my word for it, go look at the bug tracker of any major distro...do you have bugs that are TWO years old? THREE years old? Do I hear FOUR? The bug tracker will have bugs as old as the distro itself because those bugs are shitty and would take a hell of a lot of work to fix and thus don't get done.

In a way its a lot like communism in on the surface communism sounds great, I mean everybody working together to make their their lives and the world a better place? How could that be bad? Well what you end up with is a billion artists and nobody doing the job cleaning up the puke at the Chuck E Cheese. It got so bad that the USSR had to actually assign soldiers to "potato duty" which was all the shitty jobs they couldn't get the people to do, but large FOSS projects don't have that luxury.

I'm sure every programmer here will instantly mod me down because they don't like to think that their job is shitty, but c'mon dudes, it really is. Bug hunts, regression testing, writing docs, dealing with those little weird errors that just seem to pop up in corner cases and are maddening to track down...those are shitty jobs. This is why you see so many new releases in FOSS when the previous one hasn't even had half the bugs fixed so they are adding new bugs onto old bugs because writing new programs? That is enjoyable, making something with your own two hands is something we humans have enjoyed and took pleasure in for thousands of years, being the guy that has to widen the ditch because the sewage is backing up? Not so much.

Sorry hairyfeet, this rant has nothing to do with Wikipedia's choice to upgrade. You've been taken for a ride by a troll, hook line and sinker. They didn't upgrade because it was someone's pet project or because it was "cool". They upgraded so that they'll maintain a viable upgrade path for the future. For all practical purposes, MySQL's release model right now is broken, so if you're running a serious project, you can't just hope Oracle won't break it for you. Your rant is simply wholly inapplicable to the

It seems like you haven't used proprietary software at all... I've seen a lot of QA issues like those mentioned in your rants in proprietary software, as well as OSS. On the other hand, I regularly use two very slick OSS projects both privately and at work: calibre [calibre-ebook.com] and Sigil [google.com]. Both are hands down the best option available in their category, proprietary or not. Nothing else even comes close. Both are maintained by extremely competent devs, have quick issue turnaround, and are relatively simple to run from source, as I have done to make (and contribute) a couple of fixes and improvements myself. In the case of calibre, millions of non-tech users are happily using it to catalogue their ebooks.

In your case, as it seems like OSS ate your dog, feel *very* free to look elsewhere. I've done so as well when I can't find anything that suits my requirements. There have been a few of your kind visiting the forums of those two projects. These people make incoherent, irrational demands, rant, won't listen to reason, and even refuse to explain what they mean so that people can help them. None of this is constructive for anyone. Although they're generally treated politely, we're frankly better off without them. Then you have people who bring rationally presented and relevant complaints to the table while behaving themselves, they usually walk away with a fixed issue, a workaround they're happy with, or a good explanation why a solution is not forthcoming (and yes, this can be "I'm not personally interested in implementing this feature, patches are welcome"). The project benefits from these people as well. Of course there are also bad and irrational maintainers out there, as well as projects so bad they're worthless, the barrier of entry isn't exactly high.

The point is: No, OSS devs aren't your employees. Neither are you their paying customer, and you have no right to make demands. No, not even if you donate $3. Take what they offer, or not. Nonetheless, if you can't see the indescribably huge value in a plethora of OSS projects, including Wikipedia, I feel sorry for you. There are millions of people with better people skills and/or technical knowledge than you who actually make OSS work for themselves, every day.

Sadly that is true and why FOSS will ALWAYS suck for anything bigger than a project that can be done by a handful in a garage, its a problem I noted years ago and gave the name "Busted shitter problem".

You see if I ask for somebody to paint me a picture or sculpt me a bust or write a song for free? I will get several offers, some of which might even be really good. If I ask someone to come fix that overflowing shitter for free? Well I better get used to pissing in the sink.

Which is why your "busted shitter problem" works the opposite way in FLOSS. Because when a FLOSS shitter breaks, it's not just you, it's a whole mess of people. Some of them are willing to pay to have the problem fixed, and some might even be capable of cleaning the shit off themselves. When ONE of them does fix the issue, then then everyone's busted shitter is fixed all at once. Compare this to a proprietary shitter than no one is allowed to fix but the shitter manufacturer: You have to wait on a specialist to come out with a fix, if they find it in THEIR interest to fix it... So, that's why Linux is better and faster than Microsoft is at patching OS vulnerabilities -- Linux, a successful project that runs damn near every web server on the planet, and powers the most smartphones as well, I might add. The many successful FLOSS projects that are bigger than a handful of devs does not completely obliterate your points, but makes you look pretty damn foolish, IMO.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that a core team of maintainers should be small. When starting out these maintainers are also developers. However, when the project gets bigger it's restructured so that devs get to keep developing and maintainers just merge and test and verify, etc. Lather rinse and repeat. Linux is successful because the dev became a maintainer quickly and let others do the dirty work. Protip: Linus doesn't write much code these days, but every kernel patch still crosses his desk. Ballmer and the late Jobs could only dream of such levels of control... Aside: What happens when Linus dies or quits? He's already set up the system of trust so that anyone can now replace him immediately.

This flexibility and scalability in structure is something that all companies should take a look into. Many are doing so. Some, companies are letting users fix their broken shitters for free to the benefit of all. Others claim control over all shiter functions, and thus become synonymous with their broken shit.

Unlike Communism FOSS projects and distros can make money, (See e.g. Red Hat, Canonical etc..) and so can pay people to do the shitty jobs that otherwise would not get done

The USSR had for a large part of it's history a large army standing around with nothing to do, so yes they got them to do jobs that others did not want to do....see also the US army when they are not busy....

Everybody regards a different kind of problem as your "busted shitter" though. Proprietary software companies regard problems that won't affect sales by much to be such. There are bugs in Excel VBA 2010 that were identified in Excel 97. Microsoft just can't be bothered; nobody is going to stop the whole corporation automatically buying MS-Office because a few VBA macro fans in accounting and engineering have to do awkward workarounds. So despite having all those piles of cash to pay people do dig in

You need to be particularly thick, or just trolling, to think that upgrading a database system must only be done because of politics. Protip: just because the successor (MariaDB) is a fork of MySQL doesn't mean the political reason was very important. Not at all, it was merely a nice windfall. They needed to upgrade anyway.